Sarah Kember

Life After New
Media: Mediation as a Vital ProcessSarah Kember and
Joanna Zylinska
(MIT Press 2012)

This co-authored
monograph
critically examines the current debate on ‘new’ or ‘digital’ media. It
makes a case for a significant shift in the way new media is perceived
and understood: from thinking about ‘new media’ as a set of discrete
objects (the computer, the mobile phone, the iPod, the e-book reader)
to understanding media predominantly in terms of processes of
mediation.

The argument is
threefold:

(1) In an era
when being on
Facebook or Twitter, having a smart phone or a digicam, and obtaining
one’s genetic profile on a CD after being tested for a variety of
genetic diseases has become part of many people’s everyday lives, we
maintain that there is a need to move beyond the initial fascination
with, and fear of, ‘new’ media; and beyond the belief in their alleged
‘newness’, too.

(2) There is also
a need to
look at the interlocking of technical and biological processes of
mediation. Doing so quickly reveals that life itself has become a
transient medium, which is subject to the same mechanisms of
reproduction, transformation, flattening and patenting that other media
forms (CDs, video cassettes, chemically printed photographs, and so on)
underwent previously.

(3) If life
itself is to be
understood as a medium, we need to critically examine the complex and
dynamic processes of mediation that are in operation at the biological,
social and political levels in the world, while also remaining aware of
the limitations of the stand-alone human ‘we’ that can provide such a
rational critique.

The aim in Life
after New
Media is to achieve something other than merely providing an extension
or corrective to the current field of ‘new media studies’. Instead of
developing an alternative definition or understanding of new media, the
authors refocus the new media debate on a set of processes that have so
far escaped close analysis by media studies scholars. In other words,
with this book we are not so much interested in moving the debate on
new media on, but rather in moving on from the debate on new media;
and, in doing so, focusing on the concept of mediation. The distinction
is of course primarily heuristic, i.e. provisional and tentative, and
the purpose of separating mediation from media is to clarify the
relation between them. Mediation does not serve as a translational or
transparent layer or intermediary between independently existing
entities (say, between the producer and consumer of a film or TV
programme). It is a complex and hybrid process, which is
simultaneously economic, social, cultural, psychological and technical.

Astrobiology and
the Search for Life on Mars(Open Humanities
Press, 2011)

This is an open
access
electronic book and part of a series entitled ‘Living Books about
Life’. The aim of the series is to engage with the cultural aspects of
new developments in science and technology and this volume explores the
field of Astrobiology from a critical theoretical and fictional
perspective, linking it to the historical and contemporary aspects of
the search for life on Mars. The key features of the book are that it
includes all of Percival Lowell’s writing on Mars in addition to the
full text of H.G. Well’s The War of the Worlds. It reviews the Viking
experiments of the 1970s and includes an article written exclusively
for this volume by one of the experimenters, Gilbert Levin who reviews
and updates the findings of the labeled release experiment, claiming
that he did discover life on Mars 40 years ago. The introduction
connects Lowell’s claim that intelligent Martian life must be
responsible for the presence of canals on Mars with Levin’s claim to
have discovered microbial life on Mars with another more recent claim
by a character named Lou. Lou’s more recent experiment, subsequent to
the discovery of liquid water, is that Mars is host to an organism
resembling green sulphur bacteria.

Cyberfeminism
and Artificial Life
(Routledge, 2003)

Cyberfeminism and Artifical Life examines the construction,
manipulation, and re-definition of life in contemporary
technoscientific culture. The book takes a critical political view of
the concept of life as information and traces it through the new
biology and the discourse of genomics, as well as through the changing
discipline of Artificial Life, and its manifestation in art, language,
literature, commerce and entertainment.

From cloning to computer games, and incorporating an analysis of
hardware, software and ‘wetware’, Sarah Kember extends current
understanding by demonstrating the ways in which this relatively
marginal field connects with, and connects up global networks of
information and communication systems.

Inventive Life. Towards the New Vitalism (with Mariam Fraser and Celia
Lury) (Sage, 2006) demonstrates how and why vitalism – the idea that
life cannot be explained by the principles of mechanism – matters now.
Vitalism resists closure and reductionism in the life sciences, whilst
simultaneously addressing the object of life itself.

The aim of this collection is to consider the questions that vitalism
makes it possible to ask: questions about the role and status of life
across the sciences, social sciences and humanities and questions about
contingency, indeterminacy, relationality and change.

All of these questions have special importance now, as the concepts of
complexity, artificial life and artificial intelligence, information
theory and cybernetics become increasingly significant in more and more
fields of activity.

photographies a
new journal
edited with David Bate, Martin Lister and Liz Wells.
Photographies seeks to construct a new agenda for theorising
photography as a heterogeneous medium that is changing in an ever more
dynamic relation to all aspects of contemporary culture.

The journal aims to further develop the history and theory of
photography, considering new frameworks for thinking and addressing
questions arising from the present context of technological, economic,
political and cultural change.

We investigate the contemporary condition and currency of the
photographic within local and global contexts. The editors seek
research papers and innovative visual essays, shorter papers engaging
new debates, review essays, cultural events, key developments,
exhibitions and conferences.

'The Virtual Life of Photography', photographies Vol 1, Issue 2,
December 2008 (this article is free to download from the photographies
website, and is also available - with a question mark added - on itunes
under Photographic Mediation)